"A recent study reports that audiences watching a movie will register similar brain-wave patterns. Pessimists might see this as proof of pop culture as brain control. Optimists would regard it as a key to artistic universality.

No single work of art can appeal to everyone. But when a movie like "Titanic" is seen all over the world, it suggests that its director, James Cameron, has reached down to artistic bedrock. Or when people throughout the United States, watching at home on their isolated television screens, are riveted by the final episode of "Sex and the City," that helps bind us together.

This country's great gift to world culture has been its popular arts. Partly because such art offers this kind of bonding experience — corporately distributed popular culture as intimations of community — and partly because the art at its best is so good, on the strictest elitist criteria."

-- from a recent New York Times article, "Corporate Culture Clash: Elitism, Popularity and Rock 'n' Roll"